A cool and swinging close to PMMB’s first year of quarterly publication.

Abstract

improvisation reflects the real-time integration of generative processes with musical knowledge representation. This impressive ability has surprisingly received little attention from the psychomusicological research community as a whole. Fortunately, in April 2013, Martin Norgaard and his colleagues at Georgia State University hosted a conference on the psychology of music improvisation called Improvising Brain. The present special issue of Psychomusicology: Music, Mind & Brain (PMMB) entitled Jazz Improvisation: Cognitive Perspectives is an outcome of that conference. The featured articles represent one of the first, if not the first, collections to focus on the music- cognitive-motor behaviors and processes associated with jazz improvisation. The authors use the style of jazz as a vehicle for broader discussions of improvisation in music, which of course is by no means limited to jazz. In other words, the special issue is more about music improvisation than about jazz per se.I would like to thank Martin Norgaard, Susan Rogers, and Peter Vuust for serving as Guest Coeditors. Their issue for PMMB reaches a new milestone in the separate histories of jazz and music psychology. This milestone was unimaginable just a few decades ago and is reached today largely through the efforts and talents of the editorial team. Martin kindly accepted my invitation to consider a publication with his conference as a springboard. His experience in and enthusiasm for research on cognitive processes underlying jazz improvisation, his background as a jazz fiddler and jazz educator, his editorial experience and strong organizational skills served him well as the lead Coeditor. Guest Coeditor Susan Rogers was well placed as a faculty member at Berklee College of Music, historically a training ground for jazz musicians. A professional recording engineer and producer before coming to the field of music psychology, her psycho- acoustic rigor and her experience with the nuances of performance offered valuable assets to the editorial team. Completing the trio was Peter Vuust of Aarhus University, in Denmark. As a professional jazz bassist and prolific neuroscientist, his insights and cooperation were invaluable. The resulting collection is full of lively original content. Though the articles were on jazz improvisation, it was not the case, however, that anything goes. All submissions were internally reviewed, and, with the exception of the introduction by Martin Norgaard and a report on the conference, all were externally reviewed. …